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Pressured to change his story
The entrance wound
Perry was a trauma room physician who worked feverishly to keep the President alive. After Kennedy was pronounced dead, he described the neck wound to the press as an entrance wound. Asked whether it appeared to be coming at him, he agreed, and he agreed again when a reporter asked whether it was in the front of the throat.
The night of calls
A week after the assassination, the journalist Martin Stedman and a few colleagues visited Perry at his home in Dallas. Perry told them it was an entrance wound. He also described the night of the autopsy: several calls came from the autopsy doctors, who warned that he would probably lose his medical license if he did not change his mind.
The next day, a nurse named Bell told him he looked like hell. Perry told her he had been on the phone off and on all night long with people at Bethesda Naval Hospital who wanted him to say that the wound in the President's throat was an exit wound.
What came later
Eventually, after a long paragraph of assumptions, Perry admitted to the Warren Commission that the shot could have come from the rear. In the 1970s, a Dallas Secret Service agent named Elmer Moore confessed that he had badgered Perry into making a flat statement that there was no entrance wound in the neck. Moore was acting on orders from Washington and the Secret Service. He regretted it, and he added that everyone did what they were told out of fear of losing their heads.
How do doctors tell entrance wounds from exit wounds?
A typical entrance wound from a bullet is small and round, with a thin ring of scraped skin around the edge called an abrasion collar. An exit wound is usually larger and more irregular, because the bullet has slowed and tumbled by the time it leaves. These patterns vary with the bullet's speed, its shape, and the tissue it crosses. A medical procedure on the wound can erase the very features examiners rely on.
Why do doctors cut into the throat in an emergency?
A tracheotomy is an incision into the windpipe below the voice box that gives air a direct route to the lungs. Emergency teams use it when injury or swelling blocks the upper airway and a breathing tube cannot be passed through the mouth. The incision is made in the front of the neck, near the base of the throat. Parkland's doctors performed one on Kennedy at the site of the throat wound.
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